^^^^
CB: “Thick description” is a concept from the late Clifford Geertz. My main teacher, Marshall Sahlins, kind of left cultural materialism in about 1972 in lectures I had in my Senior theory class with him, and became theoretically much closer to Geertz. The 1972 lectures’ ideas are all together in _Culture and Practical Reason_. Sahlins became a Levi-Straussian structrualist.

I have a critique of Sahlins, which is something of a negation of a negation of cultural materialism.

Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.

^^^
CB: I should say that I have two degrees in anthropology. I basically consider myself to “be” an anthropologist intellectually. So this statement is meant to be a form of criticism/self-criticism. Or at least the idea is to let people know that I know anthropology ain’t perfect, even though I talk it all the time. Have you ever seen the collection of essays _Reinventing Anthropology_ ?

Oh brother.

“…The academic lineages exposed in the leaked Handbook are enlightening. In particular, the Handbook draws heavily from and cites the work of American anthropologist and research methods guru H. Russell Bernard (Disclosure: I have known Russ Bernard for over twenty years, he was a member of my doctoral dissertation committee, I consider him a friend.) and anthropologist James Spradley—both highly regarded anthologists and research methodologists. The Handbook recommends several specific ethnographic tools, some of which are found in many anthropologists’ toolkits including: “The core software components (Analyst Notebook, ArcGIS, Anthropac, UCINet and NetDraw) allow the team to conduct network analysis, Modeling and Pattern analysis and geo-spatial analysis that place those people and events in place and time.” The Handbook includes sample interview forms that can be used to catalog members of occupied populations in remote databases. There are discussions of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis written at a high school or middle school level of sophistication, describing such techniques as producing ethnographic field notes or conducting structured and unstructured interviews. James Spradley’s 1979 “Taxonomy of Ethnographic Questions” and his “Elements in the Ethnographic Interview” are cited and reproduced in full. The Handbook includes a list of an interesting knowledge-tree of local concerns that military occupiers should be aware of—this list includes such items as knowledge of local archaeological resources, hand gestures, shortages of water, electricity and other resources. The list provides a matrix to be used by anyone wishing to inventory items needed when attempting to establish full spectrum dominance over a given occupied people.

The inclusion of these specific methodologies, toolsets, interview and inventory sets is an artifact of Human Terrain Systems’ focus on neo-positivist notions that social control of the human landscape can be achieved by the recording of, and then manipulation of key variables in these environments…”

All of this is the new shit. I was talking with some other anthro types about it, recently. Apparently, it’s one of the directions that’s taking off, in “the evolution of the discipline.”

Like hail it is. It’s behavioral social psychology, like ad people use. Utilizing the sort of ethnographic details traditionally noted by anthropologists doing fieldwork, and then boiled down to “metrics.”

I learned a little bit of it in school, mostly in my one “Kinship and Social Organization” class. I barely survived that one, it was my lowest grade. None of it stuck. Don’t ask me to explain the inheritance arrangements of the male offspring in Arab extended families. To this day, it eludes me. It is, however, readily quantifiable. And yeah, I have little doubt that sort of knowledge can be exploited by a military occupation force. To some extent. And quite probably, at the expense of other factors, unquantifiable on even the most complex multi-vectored graph. Like lasting goodwill, and trust.

I get it, I suppose. They expect to Dial It In. Total Control.

But there’s an Imp of the Perverse, to that sort of perversity. And the Ultimate Reduction of that unholy alchemy is more liable to crystallize Adamantine Opposition than it is to catalyze the Universal Solvent.

Seriously. If you can hear me- back away from that.

Academic Anthropology, setting itself up to be ritually murdered and devoured by Behavioral Psych. Maybe that’s the logical rebound from the influence of the sophistries of the Deconstructionists, having convinced Anthro that it’s soul is an illusion to be dispensed with.

Good thing that the real action in anthropology is…somewhere else.

No, Deconstructionism was never my thing either. And neither was academia.

That’s left me free to come up with an Anthropological Paradigm of my very own. I call it Inertial Functionalism.

The precept of Inertial Functionalism holds that a given human culture learns over time to adapt to a given set of conditions- ecological, material, and in regard to any “foreign’ human neighbors that they might have. And the ones that are most successful get very good at continuing to do what they’ve always done, to make themselves successful. To the point where their power grows so great that it’s simply experienced as inertial, as the baseline for the culture/society on top..the ball is rolling, and it keeps rolling…until conditions change. Which they do.

A society/culture that uses its consciousness to notice those changes might conceivably recover enough actual innovative dynamism to change course, or slow down, or respond in some way other than heading for disaster.

But if it doesn’t- because it’s always been The Winner, and always felt it securely possessed what constituted the keys to success, and can’t imagine what might possibly change, or why it would have to change for anything- it hits the wall. What used to work don’t work no more.

…

I keep paging through history, looking for an example of a dominant culture that learned to maintain enough flexibility, humility, and foresight that it headed off its own destruction.

But I haven’t found one, yet.

I’ll keep looking. In more places than the history books, though.

Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.

I’ve also run across the canard that “anthropology is Jewish crypto-Marxism”, or words to that effect.

Mind you, I’ve never been one to buy into the defensive retort so often offered by those who receive hostile criticism from both ends of the old 2-D ideological spectrum, that “therefore, we must be doing something right.”

Not necessarily.

So rather than simply dropping that cliched punch-line and resting the case (as if it demonstrated a Final Wisdom so self-evident that no further comment was necessary) this Anthropology BA* will attempt to explicate a defense of The Discipline.

First: I don’t know how Jeri Lynn got the idea that “the origins of anthropology go back to colonialism, especially the British in India”, but that simply isn’t the case.

The founders of the academic discipline of anthropology were not primarily of British origin. Yeah, they were European males. (Beware of the intellectual error of “Presentism”…it would hardly have been otherwise, would it? ) But anthropology hardly had its origins as an organized plot to subjugate the natives. At the outset, it hardly had organization at all…rather, it just sort of vaguely coalesced over time, as both the newest of the “social sciences” (bogus phrase) and the most holistic.

Get that point. “Holistic.” Anthropology is supposed to comprise the disciplined observation of everything that human groups do. Or something like that. It’s an umbrella subject, that way. Paradoxically, since the horizons it attempts to encompass are so vast, no one can hope to Master it. It’s a Controlled Folly, at best. And that is a Humbling State Of Affairs- or at least it should be.

By the time I studied it in the mid-1990s, anthropology consisted of four sub-disciplines: Physical Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, and Cultural Anthropology. Whatever the emphasis one picked as a student, one was required to learn something of the other three.

But that isn’t how it started.

Before there was Physical Anthropology, there was Quack Science- like Phrenology, and Biological Explanations of the Blood Supremacy of the Aristocracy, And Of The Anglo-Saxon Race.

Before there was Archaeology, there was Looting.

Before there was Linguistics, there was Philology (which at least had the advantage of having the objective pursuit of knowledge as its primary goal.)

Before Cultural Anthropology, there was History, Travelogue, and Exotic Customs of the Natives, as related by the unreflective biases of the Explorers, the Conquerors, the Colonialists, the Merchants, the Priests, and the Missionaries.

The goal of Cultural Anthropology was to bust all of that. Believe it or not. One of the men considered to be the founder of academic anthropology was Lewis Henry Morgan, who was adopted into the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nations and given the name Tayadaowuhkuh, which means “bridging the gap” between the European settlers and the Iroquois. Morgan was one of the earliest ethnographers- someone who recorded observations of another people and their culture by living among them, rather than the traditional stance of keeping a perspective physically grounded at all times in the confines of ones own familiar society.

Since then, anthropologists and ethnographers have been sometimes been criticized for their presumption that they could ever hope to gain insight on cultures they weren’t raised in, no matter how much time and effort they spent attempting to learn the lifeways of a strange tribe.

I’ve always wondered at that critique, whenever it was delivered simply as a blanket dismissal. The subtext seems to be that the only possible purpose of an Ethnographic Anthropologist is to act as a Trojan Horse from the Dominant Culture- that any expression of openness, curiousity, and mutual acceptance and respect was simply a mask, and underneath the facade beat the heart of George Armstrong Custer, or Hernando Cortes. Blood Guilt, vulgar Marxist style. Cheap shot pseudo-analysis. More often than not, delivered as a judgement by “whites” against other “whites”- or even, once the more-radical-than-thou get on a roll, at “non-whites” of suspect Ideological Purity. Petty status one-upmanship in a contest for that most absurd of oxymorons, Academic Street Cred.

And one of the problems with that sort of sloppiness is the fact that Cultural Anthropology has been, from time to time, exploited in exactly that way.

CIA “ethnobotanists” in the South American rain forest, trying to “bond” and “do outreach” with the indigenous tribes so they can get hold of better brands of untraceable poisons and mind-bending chemicals for Allen Dulles, Sid Gottlieb, and the TSS pilot projects? Most likely.

Jolyon West, pursuing “ethnographic research” in the Haight-Ashbury in 1967 on behalf of his unknown (at least to me) superiors? Well, it looks that way.

Ethnocentric Imperialist American Establishment anthropologists? Sure. Consider the life and career of Carleton Coon, for crying out loud. But that isn’t the fault of the discipline of anthropology.

Think about it. There is no academic discipline that can’t be perverted to some extent by the material power of a corrupt ruling class. Critiquing anthro as “the handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism” doesn’t say much more than saying that “history is the handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism”, or “agricultural science is the handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism” or “social psychology is the handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism” or “psychedelic research is the handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism” or “Christianity is the handmaiden of imperialism and colonaialism.” Yeah, that’s what happens when they get their hands on it. Beyond that, the statement doesn’t carry much weight.

I like Cult Ant because it’s open-ended. It’s infinite. But it still has some decent founding principles, like the Psychic Unity of Mankind. And it doing it well does demand disciplined critical thought. No matter how anyone tries to make it a travesty- or how well they’ve occasionally succeeded.

And that’s why I’m not surprised that the US Government is apparently packing in and shutting down its latest Experiment in Necromancy, having attempted to play the Anthropologists into their game- with what was apparently, at most, “attenuated success.”

And presumably, those anthropologists who kept their wits about them sufficiently to keep performing their ethnographic “thick descriptive analysis” on the institutions in which they were embedded will have a few instructive tales to tell, as time goes by.

After all, that had to have been more of an intellectual challenge than answering clueless questions like “why them farmers keep growing so much opium? How do we talk them into crop substitution?”

“Well, General, I’m no Economist. But it seems to me that when you have a commodity that’s compact enough to have currency-like properties, worth its weight in precious metals and nearly as liquid an asset when given a properly hospitable set of political arrangements, the product of an agricultural crop that’s renewable…” Blah blah blah.

…the odds for suicide or death in a small plane go way up if you are a Democrat in an upcoming crucial election, or are about to testify in an investigation that somehow involves the neocon crowd.

One of those coincidences? Or perhaps as “Dutch” Schultz, Murder Incorporated, is rumored to have said: “It must have been one of THOSE Coincidences…”

OpEd News on Mike Connell

Check out all these unexpected deaths of people involved with elections

Keep your coincidence caps handy, folks. People involved in elections and voting machine companies seem very unlucky. Especially those in Ohio (4 of the 7) and Georgia (2 of the 7).

By Pokey Anderson

Pokey Anderson has broadcast or published numerous reports on voting machine issues over the past four years. She co-produces a weekly news and analysis radio program, The Monitor on KPFT-Pacifica in Houston.

1. Dan Rocco — April 1, 2002 — ChoicePoint VP — plane crash

2. Wesley Vance — April 26, 2003 — Diebold VP — plane crash

3. Anthony J. Celebrezze Jr. — July 4, 2003 — Diebold consultant — cause of death not confirmed

4. Athan Gibbs, Jr. — March 12, 2004 — invented the TruVote system — car crash – collided w/ 18-wheeler

5. Andy Stephenson — July 7, 2005 — nationally known election activist — pancreatic cancer

6. Rev. Bill Moss — August 2, 2005 — lead plaintiff in Moss v. Bush — stroke

7. Mike Connell — December 19, 2008 — national GOP computer guru — solo plane crash

–30–

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/25/AR2008122500931.html?hpid=topnews

…excerpt…

Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.

For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country’s roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

As for weighing in, all I can say is that the odds for suicide or death in a small plane go way up if you are a Democrat in an upcoming crucial election, or are about to testify in an investigation that somehow involves the neocon crowd. It’s probably just an unfortunate coincidence.